Satan’s Garden

I realize that the title of this article is an absolute truth no matter what, but the Center for Media and Democracy shows that the shallow fatuity of the deception is simply startling.

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)—a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

See the article and view the videos on your own and realize that television is the last place to look for actual news.  (Especially remember that when the push to invade Iran comes.)

Once more, clear and concise proof comes down the line, showing that our computer climate models are as bogus as the incomplete data they are fed.

The IPCC has been making shrill predictions for the changes to come, calling for drastic action on our part in order to help combat a century and a half of major CO² emissions, all based on computer models showing that the world average temperature was on a one-way path of rising.

Only, the last decade there hasn’t been a rise, in spite of an increase in CO² emissions.  This last winter was such a cooling event, that it pretty much negated the last 100 years of warming.  It’s hard to even come to a conclusion as to when the highest temperature was in the 20th century.

Now a new study is coming out saying that global warming is going to pause for another seven years, then get around to rising again.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

Let’s boil down what is being said here.  The previous model was wrong.  Real data is showing that the previous predictions for the last decade were wrong.  Now a new model says there will be a pause, then temperature will start climbing again.

So why are we supposed to believe that the new model is any more acurate than the others?

It’s also odd that “natural climate variations” can cause cooling, but can never be responsible for warming trends.

This all plays like every other doomsday prediction, from Nostradamus to the Bible - complete fiction.

Data from the Aqua satellite project show that the tropospheric “heat island” that is required for the feedback mechanism of anthropogenic global warming to occur, simply doesn’t exist.  Without this mechanism, CO² can only push warming so far, then it fails to have further affect.

Hopefully, real science, like the Aqua Project - which are examining actual data and not just playing with computer driven assumptions - will give us a better understand of what is going on and calm the retarded Green political seas of global warming.

A lot of interesting news this week, so far at least.

First, we have for chief prosecutor former Guantánamo’s military commissions, Col. Morris Davis, going off to the press to warn how the Gitmo trials are rigged.

British Columbia is starting a Carbon Tax on fossil fuels as part of their budget plan. Proving once more my long held point that the Global Warming Church is merely a protection racket.

Another worthless bully with a badge Taser’s a high school student after a “small altercation” during a basketball game at the school gym.

Yet another abusive cop whines that he was treated unfairly when he is fired after he turns off a video camera after an arrest, only to show a woman beaten to within an inch of her life after the camera comes back on. The old, “she fell!” mantra is called, of course.

Though Al Gore has predicted that sea water levels are going to flood half the population of Earth off the face of the planet, Venice sea levels are at a fourteen year low.

Oil has topped $100 a barrel, but we haven’t seen anything yet, with the US economy on the verge of a complete meltdown.

But at least the CIA can stop trying to poison wetsuits and other failed assassination attempts, for Fidel Castro has resigned as Cuba’s President.

I’ve decided to move this site to its own domain. (Users may have noticed problems for a couple of hours today, related to my being an idiot and trying to move too quickly…)

In the near future, this The old URL will auto-redirect to http://www.satansgarden.org and I will keep the redirect in place on the old server to make sure that people are forwarded properly when examining old listings in Google, etc.

For those who think I’m making up this crap as I go, here’s another fun story about entering the country from Canada…

Welcome to America. Now Get Your Hands Up

Air travel is going to take a turn for the even worse when it comes to foreign flights leaving the USA.

According to this article in the Guardian, passengers traveling from the US will have to be fingerprinted to be allowed on any flight.

It’s enough to make you vomit. Read the article here.

Personally, unless there simply is no other way, I stopped flying after 9-11; not because of any fear of terrorism, but because I don’t like being treated like dirt.

It’s not just air travel, however. I went on a motorcycle tour through western Canada in 2004, trying, but failing to get to Alaska. (Wildfires kept closing the ALCAN.) Since the terrorist hype was going full bore less than three years after the World Trade Center attack, I thought it best to get a passport before crossing the border. This was before the current requirement to have a passport to return from Canada existed, but I was smart in predicting a paranoid and over-reactive government.

Crossing over to Canada was a breeze. As I drove in, there were three small buildings with drive up windows, each occupied by a Canadian official. Being the dimwit I am, I didn’t notice if they were Mounties, or some other group. There were no barricades, no armed guards, no sense of distress in the body language of anyone there. I pulled up to the window, where a cute blond gal was sitting, perhaps a little bored. I killed the bike engine.

I stated who I was, told her I was there on vacation, making my way to Alaska and showed her my drivers license and passport. The gal there didn’t even bother to stamp the passport, took a brief glance at the drivers license and then warned me that I might have trouble getting through all of the uncontrolled wildfires in British Columbia and the Yukon Territories. I thanked her for the information and motored on.

That was it.

Coming back into the US, was a far different story.

I pulled up toward the border, where several armed men shuffled about, all with the body language of paranoid watch dogs. After filing through a carefully controlled gate system, I was finally stopped under a security camera and told to kill my engine. (Note, I was not asked this on the way into Canada, I had killed the engine on my own - and would have done the same here in just a few moments.) One of the armed guards came up to me and asked where I was going. I replied that I was heading home and handed him my drivers license and passport. I can’t claim that this is an exact dialog, but it’s accurate enough…

“Where are you from?”

“Originally, or now?”

“Now.”

“Just like the drivers license says, Utah.”

“Lived there long?”

“A few years.”

“How many years?”

“Since April, ‘99.”

“Where did you live before that?”

“Indiana.”

“Why did you move to Utah?”

“Why do you care?” This was a mistake and I knew it as soon as I was done speaking.

“Why did you move to Utah, sir.” His tone was now a little tense.

“I work at the University of Utah. It was a good job offer that I couldn’t pass up.”

“So, you’re from Indiana originally?”

“No. I lived there for about 11 years. I moved there from Minnesota, where I grew up.”

“You don’t sound like you have an Indiana accent.”

“I told you, I grew up in Minnesota.”

“You don’t sound Minnesotan.” (As if this guy would know what a Minnesotan native sounds like.)

“Minnesotan’s don’t have accents, unless they live in the northern part of the state. No accent at all. That’s why we all become news announcers.” I smiled. The joke fell flat.

“Why were you in Canada?”

“I’m on vacation.”

“Where are you heading now?”

“As I’ve already stated, back home. Are we through, officer?”

“Are you carrying any food, alcohol, cigarettes or other tobacco products?”

“No.”

“Anything to declare?”

“No.”

He walked back into his armored hut, talked for a bit with another guy behind bullet proof glass, going over my drivers license and passport like I was Saddam with a shave - being sure to look up and give me the accusative glance ever few moments of talk. Finally, after deliberately wasting time for about five minutes, he came back with my ID and told me that I was “allowed” back in.

I motored back into my native country and actually wondered why I was coming back.

Our country is being converted right under our noses, into a police state. Under the guise of anti-terrorism, our liberties are being stripped, our rights are being denied and we are being assumed guilty until proven innocent.

It’s only going to get worse.

Jerry Falwell was found dead today and the world already seems a better place. Christianity has enough problems in general without nut cases like Falwell spurring on the fringe regions of the faith.

While the papers are reporting on his demise and his contributions to the right wing political engine, I’m going to instead send him of with series of quotes by him, to show just why it is that the world should make this a holiday of celebration.

• AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
• The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country
• If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being
• Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.
• I sincerely believe that the collective efforts of many secularists during the past generation, resulting in the expulsion from our schools and from the public square, has left us vulnerable
• (re: 9/11 attacks) “…throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”
• I am such a strong admirer and supporter of George W. Bush that if he suggested eliminating the income tax or doubling it, I would vote yes on first blush.
• I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
• There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
• The Bible is the inerrant … word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible,without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.
• The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That’s like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight.

But the best and most honest statement Falwell ever made was:

• Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions

The Safety Nazi’s are at it again. Their target this time, images of smoking in the movies. Yes, smoking in the movies is important enough for the MPAA to wave their golf gloves in the air for attention and some San Francisco based do-gooders to take up the oppressive moral challenge of removing images of smoking from the movies altogether.

The MPAA is quoted as saying, ‘”all smoking will be considered and depictions that glamorize smoking or … feature pervasive smoking outside of an historic or other mitigating context” could warrant a more prohibitive rating.’ Frankly, who cares what the MPAA says. The MPAA long ago made their lack of any valid moral stance known, when they ruled that you can’t show a bare woman’s breast to children, but decapitations are fine and and dandy.

This is the crap that pisses me off: The San Francisco-based center Smoke Free Movies claims that movies are responsible for 5,000 smoking-related deaths a month that might have been prevented by an R rating. The group also says movies are responsible half of the 800,000 children a year who start smoking. (Full article here.)

Where are they getting this data? What studies have been done to prove these numbers? What is the criteria being used to determine whether or not children start smoking do to the “responsibility” of movies? How have they shown that giving a film an R rating, prevents any children from smoking?

When is the last time you actually saw someone smoking a cigarette in a movie? That’s a fairly rare event these days. “Kill Bill” is about the only one which comes to my mind’s recollection, with Samuel L. Jackson smoking at the church organ, but that’s hardly a kiddy flick. If you go to their own Web page showing which of the movies out right now have smoking depicted in them, (see the page here,) the count is a bit deceptive. As of April 30th, 2007, when I took a gander, there were four of eight that have an R rating, which doesn’t qualify as a kid’s movie. Isn’t this group the one weeping over the fact that films with smoking need an R rating? Why even put those films in this list of movies? They already qualify for their goal. Three of the remaining are PG-13 and one G, which are supposed to be the most objectionable films to these folk. In all of this, you’ll have to take their word for it being a film which, “promotes smoking”. My guess, is that if it doesn’t show someone dying from it, they qualify it as “promoting smoking”. Their inclusion of R rated movies in their list shows their ultimate goal as well - the complete banning of any depiction of smoking in the movies, no matter what the ratings.

In short: this is blatant propaganda, so full of shit that you could use it to fertilize your garden! They have no studies to prove their claims. They have no studies to even support their notions! They’ve pulled some numbers out of their ass and spout it as if they are an authority. Am I supposed to believe that the Smoke Free Movies organization is an unbiased source of information?

Organizations like this come off appealing to “common sense”, but their goals are never that low. They want to control you, as much as the tobacco companies dream they could. They want to determine what is right for you, what you should be able to see, or read or think. They are controlling fascists, who ought to be stamped out, hard, like a crusty cigarette butt.

I’ll tell you who’s responsible for 5,000 smoking-related deaths a month - the 5,000 people making the decision to smoke. No one forced them to do it. No one put a gun to their head and a cigarette in their mouth.

If you want to debate the issues of peer pressure and other nonsense, let me counter with a quick rebuttal: If you haven’t taught your children to have self respect, based on a solid foundation of moral principals and steadfast self determination, able to resist any and all peer pressure - then you have failed as a parent!

I’ll add that your failure as a parent in this regard, has more striking ramifications than your children picking up bad habits. If your child is at the whim of their peers, you have sown the seeds of tyranny, by producing progeny that will goose step along with those who would rule by force over others. Dictators cannot rule, unless they can encourage the common man to enable their evil plans, to push their vile agenda - through peer pressure.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I can’t stop laughing at this. We’re not satisfied until we’ve screwed up every portion of the ecosystem that we can possibly screw up. We’re not satisfied until we control the uncontrollable.

I’ve ranted about the Church of Global Warming before, with no end of their dogmatic, unsupported stupidity in sight; but this just might take the crown for the moment. The problem is, too many trees may increase global warming!

You can read all about the bad, bad trees for yourself.

The gist of this latest assault on intelligence: trees may take in CO², but they emit methane at a staggering rate, accounting for a third of the atmospheric methane - which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO² is.

Coupled with cow farts, we must be doomed!

I have some hope. Someday, one of these worried eggheads my actually look up into the sky, see that large hydrogen explosion being held in check by it’s own gravity, and realize that it might have something more to do with climate changes than we do. At 3.86e33 ergs per second or 386 billion billion megawatts per second, even a 1% change in energy output is absolutely staggering at our orbital distance. After all, if it wasn’t for our magnetic field, we might as well be sitting in a microwave oven - all life as we know it would die. Even the atmosphere itself would be stripped off of the planet by solar wind, as has been happening to Mars since it lost it’s magnetic field.

Speaking of the Earth’s magnetic field, hasn’t it been dropping in strength over the last 100 years, in a pattern fitting the next magnetic pole flip? Far be it for me to suggest that a weakening magnetic field could have any play in our warming up.

Or what about this study? Or this one?

My point; we don’t understand all that drives our climate, from “greenhouse” gases to the sun itself. Since we don’t have all the variables at hand, our computer models are simply wrong.

Not that it matters. Even if I had absolute proof that the CO2 scare is all hype, the IPCC wouldn’t listen.

Perhaps IPCC should stand for International Paranoid Climate Crackpots?

Addendum: Sheryl Crow is promoting global warming by protecting trees in the call for limiting use of toilet paper. Bad, bad Sheryl Crow!

Does anyone write anymore?

My drivel is utter garbage, with enough punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors to make my High School English teacher warm up her cattle prod. (I wish she had warmed up her cattle prod back then, but such is a lurid fantasy best kept under wraps these decades later.) It seems to me that what passes for “well written” these days is beyond abysmal.

Take for example, my eldest stepson. He’s a nice young man, rather intelligent and finishing his BS in genetic biology. I had the honor (read as “maggot choking misfortune”) of being begged to proofread the final submission for his thesis. Personally, I don’t know a damned thing about yFAST complexes and Mec1 relations to the ATR mechanism, but I do know that when your sentence changes tense three times - with none of these tenses matching - you have a serious problem. Irony holds that it’s probably genetic.

Sending the boy to a geeky engineering college likely didn’t help matters. They stress the sciences and ignore the more banal issues of life, such as personal hygiene and eating. Sending him to public school in Utah most certainly did not help. The public school system here is very low grade. I may be biased in that my schooling in the 70’s and early 80’s was in Minnesota, a state which has always prided itself in funding education. This also helps to explain the draconian tax rates in this winter wonderland, but that is another issue.

Whereas I should continue with a story about walking the thirty miles to school each day in twenty feet of snow, with my dad strapping bacon to my ass to make the wolves chase me faster when I was running late; I will instead resort to a snide comment on how little work I’ve seen issued in school to foster functional writing skills. My youngest stepson, about to graduate from High School, has only written a handful of papers for senior Advanced Placement (AP) English. Perhaps my memory has been skewed with the advent of age and the languishing effects of nearly three decades of computer monitor radiation, but I seem to recall having to write a lot more than that.

I also don’t see the need for assignments which seem a little childish, or otherwise saccharine - especially when they’re aimed at me, rather than my child. My youngest came home with a sheet from English class a few weeks ago, which asked for parental participation in their reading assignment of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the letter, the teacher asked that the parents write a short note with sweet words of wisdom, gentle advice to give their child in preparation for life’s wonderful journey ahead; as Hamlet’s father had given to him. This reasoning, it was stated, was an attempt to “pull the child into the sentiment of the work”. That is a paraphrase. I don’t recall the actual wording, but it is fair to say that my insulin levels needed to be checked afterward.

My message was quick and easy to write and not wanting to kill a tree for it, I gave it to him verbally. “Trust no one.”

What examples I have seen of his written assignments have been horrid. It is obvious that I did not watch his education carefully enough and did not step in to correct the situation in time. The frightening part is that his papers earn good grades. If I had a time machine, I might have been able to help at the correct point. As it is, I’m encouraging him to concentrate on his writing skills when he heads off to a liberal arts college - even if it seems to be a futile gesture. Some of it will sink in.

Either that, or he’ll end up writing crap like this his whole life.